Comments by "Grak70" (@Grak70) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

@Skipsul This guy knows his shit. I work in a PA GaAs fab. New parts or changes to parts (due to a vendor ECN or supply chain shift for example) require biased HAST testing which can take months to validate. And if you fail, you have to do it again. And automotive suppliers are frequently required to maintain production for a set number of years, even if those products become a burden or drag on other production lines. It's guaranteed income if you win the contract, but frequently becomes unpalatable as the product line ages. And then there's the audits. All of this means there's very few fabs willing to take on the onus of bidding automotive contracts, so when supply contracts for whatever reason, it's a huge problem.
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This isn’t a one way street. One of the reasons city people despise rural yokels is their inability to adapt to new information. It’s a feedback loop where both groups just end up hating each other more because their MO had become to hate the other group for its own sake. There were legitimate grievances on both sides to begin with for sure, but all that is just post hoc rationalization at this point. It’s become pure tribalism.
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A fire during times of high demand is going to be more impactful, so you’re going to hear about it. Fabs are capital intensive and margins are critically linked to output. Setting fire to your own fab to boost demand when you could just stop starting new wafers would be complete insanity.
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@gijbuis Even if they were intentional, the idea that they were done with premeditation to reduce supply is nonsensical. Industrial espionage sounds exciting to the conspiracy minded person, but it's extremely rare in developed countries.
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You don’t apply this level of skepticism to anything else. There is plenty of science you accept and beleive without question because it doesn’t impose any uncomfortable thoughts or conclusions on your daily behavior.
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@williamhendrix3873 “be nicer to us or we won’t believe your science.” lol ok ❄️
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Unfortunately all observations to date suggest the universe is flat or slightly open, so this isn’t something we can count on.
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@dinf8940 France and Germany have an excellent defense industry. It is just underutilized and burdened by peacetime regulatory capture.
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@autohmae yup. The sexy EUV and multipatterning stuff from Samsung, Intel, and TSMC gets all the attention, but the vast majority of semiconductor patterning layers are still I-line/DUV. And all GaAs processing is 150mm wafers or smaller, which fundamentally makes those production lines old. Most of their tooling was built in the 1990s or earlier.
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Good luck. Silicon and GaAs are still going to dominate for decades. You can’t beat cheap with exotic when exotic hasn’t been proven to be cheap.
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@ArawnOfAnnwn he just means 2D in that those materials’ electronic properties are restricted to conduction in sheets. Electrons transmit signal along the conjugated pi bonds in graphene, but generally not between sheets.
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@Syphirioth it’s not based on someone scribbling math in a dark room. It’s based on the best empirical observations of the universe we have.
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@Syphirioth do fewer drugs dude.
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@ilyake7862 the fact that electrons can tunnel through solid objects is damn near unbelievable, but here you are using it to type dogshit on the internet. You accept science you find useful or benign without question, but demand certainty no science can generate for science that makes you uncomfortable or suggests humans need to change their behavior.
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@ilyake7862 the fact that electrons can tunnel through solid objects is damn near unbelievable. But you don’t doubt quantum theory as you type out dogcrap on the internet. You accept science that you find useful or benign without question, but demand impossible levels of certainty for science you find uncomfortable or that suggests your way of life might need to change simply because “climate” isn’t something you can walk out your front door and see changing in minutes. I’ve often heard it said if carbon dioxide was a sickly green yellow color we would have never put up with ICE vehicles, even if it had the same physical properties. The post hoc rationalization for not accepting climate change really is as simple and stupid as “I can’t see it with my eyes and I don’t like what the science says so I refuse to beleive it.” All the rhetoric against climate science is pure sophistry meant to justify a foregone conclusion. And that conclusion is: “waaaah!”
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@Aureu you’re being dramatic, but thanks for proving my point. Pure consequentialism with a heaping load of Fox News moral panic.
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@Aureu ok, PiS moral panic then. The rhetoric isn’t nuanced or unique to any country.
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@Aureu please. PiS opposed the EU CBAM tax and the ICE phaseout proposal from the start. The carbon tax they did pass was purely transactional to allow the sale of credits and stuff government coffers. And your costs are so high because those costs are passed on to consumers by coal burning state owned utilities. It’s got dick all to do with the environment and everything to do with taking your money. I will agree with you it’s not in small part a reason why they got clobbered in the most recent elections, but pretending it’s because PiS was too concerned about global warming is laughable.
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@flunkyminion no, the US political system, in the context of its voting and electoral system, is a simple consequence of game theory.
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@williamhendrix3873 except you ARE unable to accept new information. Your argument boils down to “the liberals are meanies so we won’t accept facts.”
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@devious_shelf8334 not my point at all. I think it’s hilarious that conservatives label leftists and liberals as whiney emotional crybabies when y’all’s entire MO here is arguing that they reject science because their feelings got hurt.
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@williamhendrix3873 if you believe in climate change, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about all the people you’re trying to excuse.
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@williamhendrix3873 and at this point I have exactly zero hope that any of these people will change their minds, so I literally could not care less. Conservatives are always brought kicking and screaming into reality eventually. Whether that’s by good policy decisions or the consequences of bad or no policy, the climate will not care. I long ago decided not to have kids so I won’t have to bring them up in this shithole country of alternative reality conservative snowflakes who think nothing ever has to change because it wouldn’t be convenient for them personally to care about others.
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I can tell who’s never worked in a factory here by looking at all the comments about fab fires not being a coincidence. A fab can boost demand by simply not starting as many wafers. The idea that it would intentionally destroy its own capital to cause a shortage is dumbassery on a whole new level.
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Sabine out here just casually giving me the counter-answer to Creationists’ “energy can’t be created or destroyed so the Big Bang never happened” argument.
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GaAs fab engineer here. The issue with automotive isn’t fab capacity. It’s that they never accept anything new. They’re paranoid beyond reason about anything and everything different, and these sort of unreasonable quality standards are screwing them out of inventory, because nobody wants to build garbage, old, low margin parts for them anymore.
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@autohmae I didn’t say it was easy. Automotive customers just push everything to their suppliers. At some point, some of these old fabs making controllers and sensors are going to go offline and they will be forced to switch. And it will be extremely hard for them to do so. They need to do some planning now, not when it’s a crisis.
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@me0101001000 if these materials do phase in, they will do so with a hybrid approach where the aspects of silicon or GaAs that make sense (their mechanical properties, etc) will be retained and the new materials will be incorporated as little as possible. This is how strained SiGe, HKMG, and HEMT epi materials were all introduced to semiconductors. The last thing I think you will see is something like bulk graphene wafers where silicon is just gone completely. They’re too fragile and too temperature sensitive to be practical.
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@Syphirioth dude who can’t do math thinks he has relevant commentary on cosmology.
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Teflon is not a PFAS, nor is its precursor TFE, so the timeline at 13:29 is a bit misleading.
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@trevinbeattie4888 your theory probably has at least something to do with it. I’ve been sleuthing all morning about these fires and can’t find anything on root cause. AKM doesn’t even seem to have a clear picture of the fire at their plant other than that it started in the fab.
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There ARE people who detransition, usually after transitioning at a very early age, and the consequences are very distressing. But their stories rarely get told because they fail to fit the narrative of blind support for trans healthcare that assumes all refusal of care is abuse and endangerment. Europe has much better data on trans health and takes a moderate stance on minor transition, yet weirdly the American professional societies are the ones pushing unconditional enablement of transition health care, no matter the age of the patient. As a position of policy, they are totally bananas.
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